Metro Speed Latency Test Between Branches

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

After research, analysis and study about Metro Ethernet in term of architecture, security, reliability and scalability in the previous chapter, you can see how reliability and stability Metro E is. In Malaysia the deployment and implementation of Metro E is done by the service provider, so far there is only one service provider that offered Metro E service. Telekom Malaysia (TM) is the one company that provides Metro E service. The implementation of Metro E mostly done by the service provider at their end point. They only use customer’s switches and routers to connect their fiber to establish the link. There are also several requirements specified by the Total Sdn Bhd IT for the new circuit/Metro E, including:

Service Quality: Traffic between Branch A and new Branch and Headquarters should exhibit no more than 40 ms latency

Routing Efficiency: The service provider must have enough peering to deliver traffic to internet end points directly.

Bandwidth: The circuit must support bandwidth of 4Mbps and able to upgrades incrementally up to 1 Gbps at least.

Implementing Metro E circuit has produced both technical and business benefits for Total Sdn. Bhd in term of improved performance, cost savings, investment protection, network resilience, and network compatibility.

Improved Performance: Data tracked by Total Sdn Bhd IT showed an average ping time of 21 to 25 ms for TM Metro E and the average Metro E availability level was 99.95 percent. When we first considering to deploy the Metro E at our network to replace the leased line, we were concerned the reliability that it would not reliable as existing circuit. However Metro E has delivered the availability and reliability. Now the total traffic handled by Metro E double than before.

Cost Savings: The Metro E delivers greater bandwidth (4Mbps) compared to the leased line (1Mbps) configured in previous circuit (at approximately same cost monthly). Continuing to use leased line would force us to struggle the increment of cost if we tried to upgrade the speed. This more than what Total Sdn. Bhd. requires because Metro E service offers an incremental increase of bandwidth, which reduces the higher costs for serving greater traffic.

Investment Safety: Total Sdn. Bhd. experience no problems when replace the current circuit to Metro E because Metro E allow us to make incremental capacity without additional hardware cost or service outage during capacity changes. This makes the return on investment and quality of service for Metro E simplifies.

Network Resilience: Termination the TM Metro E service at separate building on Total Sdn. Bhd. Company allows for physical diversity of the internet links and load sharing and fault tolerance. Current router also offer increased of traffic capacity and super performance, making it easier to endure the denial of service (DDOS) attacks.

Network Compatibility: Because the TM Metro E operates over a Cisco Network, both parties get the benefit from equipment interoperability and network features.

4.1 Future Proof Technology

According to TM website, Metro E gives you peace of mind to focus on expanding your business to fullest potential by deploying Metro E. The company no longer needs to select the different technologies to meet your current and future communications. Below Figure 14 shows the Metro E configuration done by TM (overview).

Figure 14: Metro Ethernet Configuration

With the high scalability you only pay what you need and Metro offers flexible bandwidth upgrades that suited your business expansion.

4.2 Testing

When the deploying the Metro E is completed, now it comes to Total Sdn. Bhd. IT to do the testing on the Metro E line. By using Cacti software we monitoring the Metro E speed whether it meets the IT requirement in order to deliver good service to customers. Cacti are one of the software that offers good tools to done the network monitoring. It stores all the necessary information to create a graph and populate them into MySQL database and can view via web browser. After Cacti captured all the data it will display the graph as shown in below Figure 15.

Figure 15: Metro Speed/Latency Test between Branches

As you can the above figure of the latency Metro E network with 4Mbps speed shows that the Cacti will do the ping latency every 5 minutes average. According to the graph also shows the average speed in millisecond which is between 21.17 and 25.46 and it meets the IT requirements. This test has been done during the peaks hour of network usage and as you can see the speed of Metro E very stable. With this data proof that the Metro E delivered 99.95 percent of availability of speed.

For the stability monitoring, we do not have graph to monitor. By using Nagios software we can monitor the service state of Metro E line which is UP and Down status of the link. Nagios able to monitors your entire IT infrastructure to ensure systems, applications, and business processes are functioning properly. When the event failure Nagios can alert the IT staff of the problem and allowing them to begin the remediation process before it outages and affect the business process, end users and customers.

Figure 16: Metro E Service State

Figure 16 above shows the information of Metro E service state for 13 days 2 hours 34 minutes and 20 seconds. As you can see the schedule check by Nagios done every 5 minutes and current status of the Metro E line is up and "OK". Nagios also able to check the flapping service of the line the result shows no flapping service at the moment and also no downtime has been scheduled. There are 6 functions in Nagios that you can enable such as Active Checks, Passive Checks, Obsessing, Notifications, Event handler and Flap Detection.